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blog-sliverofjade · 3 years

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Of Doms & Subs 5: Field Trip

Pairing: Angus Hopper x OFC

Summary: What's a submissive female to do when she fights her nature and goes on the run as a Lone wolf to avoid being assimilated into a pack?

Word count: 1896

Of Doms & Subs Master List

“Don’t feel guilty, think of it as a bribe,” Mickayla said when she’d told me we were going shopping and I was to leave my wallet behind. I stared at her. “Think of trying out packs as like dating. This is a date at a fine restaurant with a dozen roses,” she explained. “And just like dates are a way for potential mates to prove they can provide, this is how we prove that we can take care of our members.”

“It sounds more like you’re looking for an excuse to go shopping,” I said dryly. “But you’ll harass me until I give in, so ok.”

“You already know her so well,” Matt said with a hint of a smirk. She elbowed him in the ribs and she only put up a token struggle when he wrapped her up in his arms. I looked away. The whole pack seemed to be much more touchy-feely than I was comfortable with.

“Meh, I’d go for another five minutes, tops, before I pulled the Dommy voice on you.” She tossed her head so that Matt momentarily ended up with a face full of her hair.

“Dommy voice?”

“Dominant and mommy. Dommy,” Matt explained, nuzzling his wife’s hair.

“Oh.” I hid my blush by turning to shrug into my jacket. Don’t ask if you don’t wanna know the answer.

The first stop was Pike Place Market, which was already packed despite the early hour. Matt led the way to plow a path for us through the crowd with Mickayla following him so that all I could see was her curtain of golden hair and perky butt. Shane was on my heels, but not so close that he was breathing down my neck. None of the others had wanted to go shopping, preferring instead to play video games. Some things stay the same no matter the species.

I normally treat shopping like I imagine Navy SEALs treat missions: get in, get target, and get out ASAP. Mickayla obviously did not subscribe to this philosophy. Most of the items we had acquired so far were for her. I was too busy trying to ignore the din and overwhelming aromas invading my senses. My wolf also wanted to snap at every stranger who bumped into us, which thankfully was only once or twice. Most people took one look at my companions and steered a wide berth.

We were climbing a stairway that seemed to narrow even further and the low ceiling felt like it was pressing down on my head. I swayed on the edge of the stair as the wolf surged up, tearing at me, wanting to run from the mass of consumers. Pain rippled along my skin and burst like spikes in my joints until I nearly fell backward until Shane stepped forward until his firm chest allowed me to lean against him. An instant later, Matt and Mickayla flanked me, forcing the flow of shoppers to part around the island that we made.

Normally I didn’t like people touching me. Certainly not people I’d known less than a day and not so close as this. But I relaxed into the warmth and comfort of their bodies. Their combined scent surrounded me like a warm, familiar blanket. No one said anything. They didn’t have to. Their eyes all had the same look of understanding. My whole body felt raw. If I had shifted in the middle of Pike’s Place on Labor Day weekend…

“Reason number four why packs are awesome: dominants can help when you’re about to lose it,” Mickayla said gently, having seen the panic on my face. She slipped her arm through mine in what was becoming a familiar gesture. “Let’s head some place a little quieter.”

The weather was a bit too grey and windy for anyone other than locals and werewolves, so we had the waterfront mostly to ourselves as we sipped hot drinks from the first Starbucks location. The movement helped ease the need to run and calm my wolf. After a while, Mickayla paused to check that a bench was dry before sitting and patting the spot next to her. The men wandered a little way upwind, arguing about the game last night.

“Ok fine, you made your point,” I sighed and sank down next to her. “What was it this time, how long I’d last before going furry?”

“Not on this one,” she shook her head and immediately had to pick strands of hair out of her mouth when the wind caught it. “But that’s not the question you should be asking.”

I thought about that for a minute. “What would’ve happened if ya’ll hadn’t been there.” It was a statement, not a question. She gave it time for the full implications of that sink in.

“You’re not used to having to rely on others. Not since the divorce.” I glared at her out of the corner of my eye. I did not like being psychoanalyzed at the best of times. This was certainly not one.

“Gee, doc, are ya gonna tell me that I use sarcasm as a defense mechanism, too?”

“If you’re so self-aware, pup, then why did we have to have this little exercise?” She bumped my shoulder firmly with her own.

“Because you can tell a kid something’s hot, but won’t believe you till they touch it.” I slumped down further on the bench.

“Head of the class,” she saluted me with her coffee.

“Don’t make me bite you” I grumped.

“Talk like that’ll earn you a spot as teacher’s pet,” she winked. I groaned and shook my head at the pun before taking a sip of my drink. It was something fancy, “full of sugar and cream and calories, everything a growing pup needs” as Mickayla had put it when she’d ordered. Having a dominant around to step in and order was pretty nice when I was intimidated by the menu with its foreign terms and still too rattled to think straight.

“Speaking of petting.” Mickayla laughed at the segue. “John said that unmated females belong to the Alpha.” That whole sentence tasted like rotten lemons, which fanned the embers of my dormant anger. “Shit, is that the reason unmated females are second class citizens? So we’re basically whores for the Alpha because we have no other choice? If I won’t fuck Angus then I’m delivered to Eugene with a pretty bow? Montana’s, what, a ‘re-education centre’ if I don’t put out?”

“Montana’s for new wolves, those who can’t control their wolf, and those who need to heal,” she said firmly. “If you don’t want to move here or to Eugene, you can stay in Aspen Creek until you find a place and a pack you do like. As for being second class citizens, it used to be that females couldn’t participate in dominance challenges and gained status through their mate. While that seems to be slowly changing, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t be treated with respect.”

“Since I couldn’t care less about kicking butt and taking responsibility, I don’t have to worry about that, which is why I’m considered submissive in the first place,” I said with dawning comprehension.

“See, Ian was wrong, you can be taught!” Mickayla laughed with a wink.

“But what about the other… thing?”

“Wolves are very possessive,” she said slowly, as if having difficulty translating her thoughts into words. “It’s supposed to be a way to protect the women, sometimes from unwanted attention from their packmates. Some Alphas may take advantage of what’s meant to be a protective role, in much the same way some college professors tend to go after undergrads.”

“Are there many Alphas like that?” I had a gut feeling that Angus was not like that, but then again, mama always said that my “picker” when it came to men was broken.

“Rape is not condoned, but since it’s not been a problem here, that’s something you would have to ask Angus, Matt, or Tom about if you’re thinking of going elsewhere. Here, they have to answer to Angus. If any of them so much as even make you uncomfortable he’ll have their balls in a sling because you don’t have a mate to protect you. They all know that Matt would use their skull as a soup bowl if they so much as looked at me funny.”

Her scent had changed subtly with an almost salty quality that had nothing to do with the sea air. She looked down with amusement at me as I sniffed her arm. “You’re learning how to smell a lie! About the soup bowl anyway, you don’t keep evidence lying around. Good girl,” she said teasingly and petted my hair. I mock growled without meeting her eyes. She tapped my nose with a finger. “Bad pup, no cookie.” I straightened from my slouch with a laugh. “Come on, let’s hit a couple of stores that’ll be quieter than tourist trap central.”

“Do I have to?” I asked tiredly.

“Sweetie,” she slung an arm around my shoulders. “Your pants would be falling off if you didn’t have that belt tightened within an inch of its life. I think you might have even managed to put a pleat or two in it like that, not a good look. You need clothes that fit your new body.” She plucked at my jacket, which tented around me before settling again. I wasn’t necessarily fat before, but I certainly had carried more than a few extra pounds. Two weeks in the backcountry had fixed that. Oh, and becoming a werewolf helped, too. I groaned in defeat and at the thought of more crowds.

Mickayla returned triumphant from the hunt, seemingly having gained the energy that the new wolf appeared to have lost. Ellie quickly fled to her room with several large, bulging shopping bags.

“How went the great experiment?” I asked far more calmly than I felt.

“Took it like a champ, boss,” Shane answered while still untying his boots. “Lasted ninety minutes.”

“I was ready to call it at an hour myself,” muttered Matt. “Shrieking kids.” We all winced in empathy.

“I’m thinking that John was doing his best to keep her isolated,” Mickayla frowned.

“Do you think he wanted her for a mate?” My wolf paced in agitation. He wanted to taste this John’s blood under our fangs.

“Not The Hills Have Eyes, but barefoot and not-pregnant in the kitchen…” she grimaced. I felt my eyes shift to gold then back as I struggled to convince my wolf that there was nothing here for us to rend. “He told her about unmated females being under the protection of the Alpha, and led her to believe that it’s exploitive in nature,” she continued once I calmed.

“I see, thank you, Mickayla.” I turned on my heel and retreated to my office to make a call. Once the door was shut, it was virtually soundproofed against werewolves. It’s good to be the king of tech.

“I’m afraid that I don’t have any news yet, Angus,” Bran said with faint amusement by way of greeting.

“I’m afraid that I do,” I said and conveyed Mickayla’s impressions of the situation.

“And you can’t question her directly without scaring her into running.” I could readily picture him pinching the bridge of his nose in irritation. “Thank you. Keep me apprised.”

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asarsgyan · 3 years

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Chapter 9 - Extraditable Tits!

Catalina did not know it, because in her house television was destined for novels and they never watched the evening news, but in one of them and with a scoop quality, the United States Ambassador to Colombia appeared announcing that the DEA, In coordination with the Colombian state security agencies, a rigorous investigation had just completed that resulted in the names of the new drug lords responsible for shipping more than 200 tons of cocaine a year to the United States and Europe. Among them were Morón, Cardona and "El Titi", in that order of importance. The next day the newspapers headed their front pages with the names of Pablo Escobar's successors, the Rodríguez Orejuela, Carlos Ledher, Santacruz Londoño, the Ochoa and Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, emphasizing that these new bosses belonged to a more intelligent generation, in the sense of not showing off too much, more elusive, with greater capacity for bribery, more educated because some of them even studied at large universities, something that their relatives from whom they inherited the business had not done. In short, they were less visible. Of course, the news that spread like wildfire and reached the ears of everyone, except Catalina and Yésica, put the members of the new Cartel into disarray. Some said they were sheltering in guerrilla camps to evade the action of justice. Others said that they were negotiating with the paramilitaries who were negotiating peace with the Government at that time, so that they would pass them off as commanders and thus achieve a political status that could free them from an extradition request that the United States he did not deny any drug trafficker. Other sources claimed to have seen them fly to Venezuela, Panama and Cuba in their private planes. The truth is that when Catalina and Yésica arrived at the building where Cardona lived in order to ask for the money, they only found uniforms from the Police, the Prosecutor's Office, the DEA, the Army, the Interpol, the Sijin, the Dijin and the DAS and , at least a dozen journalists armed to their glasses. They did not worry, because many characters of national life lived in the building and they thought it was their bodyguards, but they knew that something serious was happening at that moment when they were stopped at the door, by an officer, with the face of an inquisitor, who He asked them where they were going. Neither of them was able to answer and they were expelled from the place without explanation. Catalina began to suspect that her luck was playing a new trick on her when Yésica asked one of the police officers, who was a friend of hers, about what was happening. The policeman who belonged to the cartel's payroll, told him in a code that the bosses had been taken by the whores and almost the police, so they had to leave before a DEA plane took them to the other side. He was referring to the fact that they were to be extradited to the United States. Catalina once again felt the world collapse at her feet and panicked when she learned that Cardona and his cronies had disappeared in disarray. Yésica marked them several times to their cell phones and found them turned off. Catalina was convinced of what the Policeman had just told her and felt, once again, the same desire to die that she felt the day that "El Titi" rejected her or the night that Albeiro told her that if she had bigger tits it would be the queen of Pereira. —Parcera, we screwed up! —Yésica told him, very scared and she began to walk from one place to another, scared to death because this new situation was going to kill her with hunger and Catalina with sadness. -And now? The petrified Catalina only managed to say while, inside, she vanished little by little. Yésica said nothing and went with her to find a list of her Mafia clients, but the only one who answered and with a changed voice was Mariño. Yésica asked him about Cardona, but he was scared, he told her very nervous that he did not know any Cardona and that, surely, she was wrong. Then he hung up on him. They dialed him again but his phone was already off. Without extenuating circumstances and painting the things the color they were, Yésica only managed to express with regret to her pale friend: " Sister, we screwed up." Those guys left and left us sucking. To capitalize on the anger she felt at this new disappointment, Catalina looked for Orlando Correa's phone number and made an appointment for him in the central park, under the statue of "Bolívar Desnudo" where "Caballo" had left her planted with the illusion in tow that afternoon rainy that never came. He congratulated him in code for having "made the return" as he was, that is, for having killed "Caballo" without being "caught" and summoned him at four in the afternoon, because he needed to see him to tell him how much he loved him and to ask her for the favor of making love to her. Immersed in a fairy tale, knowing himself desired by a woman as beautiful as Catalina, Orlando Correa arrived at the meeting place at four o'clock and greeted her with effusiveness and enthusiasm. It was scented and wearing beige denim pants and brown suede shoes. The white shirt with green and brown stripes, which was already worn, looked very clean and neat. Catalina also looked beautiful and made enormous efforts so that the hatred she felt towards him or the sadness she felt for the rout of the drug traffickers, and especially Cardona's, was not noticed. With anguish, Orlando wanted to finalize Catalina's main proposal during his call and invited her to a motel. The girl told him that she gladly accepted, but, weaving the web of her revenge, she exploited her billy goat weakness and asked if he would like to be with two women at the same time, because she had a friend who was also in need of a man and that she was sorry to leave her alone, in that state, being, as she was, his soul mate. Orlando responded with a lump in his throat that yes, of course, of course, of course, that there was no problem. I could not believe it. He was about to realize his sexual fantasy and even more so with the woman he was beginning to love. They then went to pick up Yésica, At the generous request of Orlando, they settled in the most luxurious room they found in that place decorated with bad taste and a series of strange architectural expressions that combined columns full of channels and monumental pedestals copied from ancient Babylon, large postmodern windows to gardens with pots hanging from the windows of coffee farms. In the room they found a triple bed whose railing served as a support for two bedside tables without any grace, two lamps anchored to the wall and a car radio embedded in the main drawer of one of the nightclubs. Near the door was a comfortable striped fabric sofa and a table with three chairs and a thick, heavy glass vase. The curtains were red like the rug in the room and a television set against the wall, it projected the usual pornographic images: a woman sucking a man's penis. Before the incredulous and anxious look of the honoree, the two women began to remove their clothes with a high dose of premeditated sensuality, while the naive bodyguard only managed to undress with clumsiness and anguish, without taking his eyes off them. According to plan, from one moment to the next the women stopped the show and asked Orlando to let himself be tied up to make the moment more exciting. Correa, as his colleagues and bosses called him, accepted the irresistible proposal without objection. The women proceeded to tie him hand and foot to the bed with ropes that they brought in his bag. Emotion did not make him suspect anything. The truth was that as soon as the innocent man was reduced to impotence, the women began to dress to his total amazement and they climbed on him with the desire to make him pay for everything he and his two friends had done and also everything he had not they had done. They beat him ruthlessly, in a kind of summary judgment, while reminding him of his crimes. He was beaten to death, especially on the genitals, so that it would never occur to him to take advantage of a girl again. Catalina fiercely hit him on the penis and testicles with the vase that adorned the room. Orlando's screams competed with the radio, which Yésica turned the volume to its highest level. The hostage shouted for forgiveness, but his pleas were useless. The women were ready to take away forever the weapon with which he raped the girls and they did. Orlando lost a testicle, the sensitivity of the glans and the possibility of reproducing again. Before fleeing the place, Catalina forced him to tell her the name of the third man who abused her that night and poor Orlando, beaten as he was and threatened with losing his penis and his remaining testicle forever, had no choice but to tell him that his name was Jorge Molina, while gave his phone number. Jorge Molina was summoned in the same place. Catalina told him that she remembered him with desire, that of the three he was the one she liked the most, that if he had any problem making love to her and that if she was upset if she brought a friend to her love affair who was in need of a man Well, she was sorry to leave her wanting and even more after telling him that he was the best fuck in the world. Jorge Molina, the most lustful of the three, didn't bother. His omnipotent male ego soared through the roof. He felt that the sky was not that set of white and gray clouds with blue backgrounds that he saw every morning from his window but rather the fact of making love with two beautiful girls like Catalina and Yésica. He took it so hard that before taking them to the Motel he went to a sex shop and spent a fortune buying Chinese stimulators, perverted thongs, ejaculation retardants and even a waitress apron that made them look more provocative than what they already looked. On the way to the motel, he had all the illusions in the world. The most important was to propose that they both marry him. He was thinking of telling them that he loved them deeply and that the three of them go to live because wherever they saw him, in a borrowed car and everything, taking care of the bosses' backs, at all times, he was going to turn into a tough one in a short time. That he already knew the business, that he already knew how to make coca, that he already knew the routes by heart, that he already knew where to find the contacts in Mexico, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Madrid and that, very soon, When he reported his bosses to the DEA, he was going to have a lot of money to put both of them to live as they deserved, as the pair of queens they were. She also thought that it was not a bad idea to spend the last of the fortnight taking them to a mall after leaving the motel and buying them a nice pint, with shoes included, so that they would become familiar with his broad and disinterested manner. to be. Entering the room he managed to tell them that they were going shopping when they left the motel. They thanked him with a simultaneous kiss on his cheeks and advised him, to calculate how much money he had, not to bother because they were very demanding, which is why the detail could be very expensive. Jorge Molina, who all his life had trachetal airs, told them not to worry because if he promised something it was because he could. They did so before tying him up on the pretext of wanting more emotions and an hour later, poor Jorge Molina lay on the bed, bloody, about to lose consciousness, with his genitalia in a sorry state, his face bruised from blows and saying the code of the debit card that, along with 300 thousand pesos, was the only thing that supported his gossip. In an ATM in the center of Pereira they took out 860 thousand pesos, which was all that poor Molina had, and they went to get drunk twice. One to celebrate revenge against the three men who prevented him from selling the virgo to Mariño and another for the disbandment of his tracheo friends whom they missed with pain. Orlando Correa and Jorge Molina found themselves in very similar situations during those days with broken faces and manhood, but they were ashamed to admit that they were in that sorry state thanks to the anger of two women, so one of them invented that a A taxi had run him over when he got out of the boss's truck; and the other, Jorge Molina, the most chicanero of all, that a man tried to kill him, probably because he did not want to pay extortion to the guerrilla group that blackmailed him. He said that because of his appearance, the cars in which he walked and how well dressed he kept, a front of the Farc often confused him with a rich man. Neither of us believed each other, but for the others, But the drug stampede did not only affect Catalina's ego and dreams for the third time, nor Yésica's pocketbook, nor the occupation of the surgery room of the aesthetic clinic, nor Dr. Bermejo's plans to buy a BMW. It also affected the intra-family relationships of Ximena, Vanessa and Paola, whose mothers, accustomed to receiving large markets and money as a result of their daughters' work, dedicated themselves to singing them, day and night, until they made a desperate and denigrating determination: to work in a whorehouse where, for much less money, they would sleep up to three times a night with strangers of all kinds. None of this was told to Catalina and Yésica who ended up filming in Bogotá, from aesthetic clinic to aesthetic clinic, and from friends 'houses, whom they bored in a week, at other friends' houses who did not know that they were going to them. to bore in a week. The formerly listed Paola was assigned as the first client to a public official. Well scented and very well dressed, not so good lover. The bureaucrat agreed to an hour of pleasure with her for 200 thousand pesos. Once the deal was finished, he went to the bathroom, took a box of viagra from his jacket and took a pill with water taken from the sink and held between his juxtaposed hands. Paola who was waiting for him in a damp room full of bad out of the six energies that the house had, all she did was think and think about "El Titi" and what he was going to say to her when he found out that because of her protective fault she had had to become a whore. In those, the good-natured man with a corrupt face appeared and began to outline a nervous and stupid smile with which he asked for a kiss. She told him that the kisses were only for the boyfriend and he managed to upset him so much, to the point that, without a word, he got on the bed, got under the sheets, took off his pants and underwear, maniacally folded them, put them on on the nightstand and pulled her with his arms to make love to her later, in complete silence and without taking off his shirt or his black, thin, thin and knee-length stockings. Paola cried with rage, in silence and without perceiving any pleasure. At that moment he did not feel his dizzying fall into the abyss of misfortune so much as when the smiling man with a corrupt face took out of his wallet two 50 and five 20 thousand bills and threw them at him slyly, on the rolled bed and wet, and then leave without saying goodbye. It was worse for Ximena because she had to go to bed, the first night, with the owner of the establishment, with all his record of at least 500 women, most of them prostitutes, and without receiving a single peso for their services. Vanessa didn't fare better than her two friends, either. Beginning because she had to fight with a client who refused to possess her using a condom. She said she didn't want to do it with a condom, that she didn't feel pleasure that way, and that she paid her double the rate if she allowed herself to be penetrated without that disgusting and uncomfortable rubber lining. Vanessa, who needed that money, was tempted to do so, but she began to think that if this guy did the same with all the prostitutes in the city, surely he was already a carrier of AIDS or at least venereal. That is why he resisted the urge to say yes and, in return, he suggested that he let himself do very tasty things without the need for penetration. The guy reluctantly agreed and reluctantly undressed. He was even tempted to leave the room in search of another woman, but Vanessa asked him not to leave, to let her try something because she did not want him to leave with a bad image of the women of the place. The man who had the face of a serial killer, the look of a madman, bushy eyebrows, raised cheekbones, a pronounced jaw, and thick black-framed glasses, told him he had two minutes to show him why he didn't have to go. But it only took Vanessa a minute to show that she was the best. In the end, the anonymous character in mourning was so pleased with the versatility and imagination of the little woman that he decided to pay her double for her services anyway. Simple, for meeting the rate and double for having taken it to the stars. He also asked her to become his concubine, but Vanessa, imagining that life next to a depraved like him was not going to be easy, took him out of the box with a very intelligent argument. He told her that he couldn't do that because she had to be very honest with him and she had to confess the reason for her reluctance to do it without a condom. He asked her why and Vanessa had no qualms about inventing that she was infected with the HIV virus. The strange character laughed and pushed her affectionately and then told her not to worry, that there was no problem with them living together since he also had AIDS. An intense cold ran through Vanessa's body as the madman, dressed in black, explained the new functioning of his short life. He told her that he was infected by a boyfriend she had, without denying his bisexuality, and that when his partner died, he made up his mind to take revenge on the whole world by infecting everyone he could, women and men alike. That already a dozen prostitutes and another dozen youngsters in the city were infected by him and that his goal was to reach the fifty victims before he died. Vanessa, who was about to become the twenty-fifth victim of the unbalanced, panicked and tried to get rid of him as soon as possible. He told her that all of this was wonderful. That it seemed good to him that others felt firsthand what they were feeling and that from now on he was going to suggest to his clients that they do it without a condom. The mentally deranged man even suggested that if the clients insisted with the condom that she sneakily pinch the end to make them "bitchy." They arranged to meet the next day to go shopping and the murderer disappeared with a happy face. When she calculated that the depraved man was already far from the room, Vanessa began to tremble with fear, with the certainty that she had been on the verge of death and ran, in disgust, to bathe with a scrubber and then go out to ask everyone world if AIDS could be spread orally. Vanessa, Paola and Ximena's mothers did better. The three of them did have their souls returned to their bodies, and also the market to the refrigerator. Happy with the return of the money to the house, none asked questions and all three began to scold their siblings for not letting them sleep during the day. The truth is that with the arrival of the skinny cows, thanks to the rout of the drug traffickers, all the women who derived their livelihood and their ostentation from their unlimited checkbooks had to resort to different strategies so as not to deteriorate their standard of living and income. . Paola, Ximena and Vanessa became sex workers, Catalina and Yésica went to try their luck in Bogotá, many others who did not know, became they got into reigns of one thing and another and, the most beautiful and intelligent, entered television. Some of them, the least talented, slept with directors, librettists and producers to win a role, sparking a wave of outrage among actresses who burned themselves for years studying performing arts to deserve a second-rate role in a novel.

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ohjohnno · 4 years

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Outrageous Fortune Reviewcap: S1E09 (”When The Blood Burns”)

I’ve been demurring on this one, partly because of real life shit (well, mostly that to be honest) but also because this episode isn’t all that good. It’s an episode entirely centering around Antony Starr’s characters, and I sure hope they paid him double, cos the range he needed for it was tremendous. But, unfortunately, one of those characters (Van) just isn’t all that interesting yet, and the other (Jethro) is ill-served by one of the dumbest and most unfortunate sideplots the show has yet had. So, without further ado, we’ll get this one out of the way, and I’ll try and keep it short.

We open with a dual appearance from the two most irritating characters in the show: Tracy and Suzy Hong, their differences now thoroughly mended and united in enjoying themselves by tormenting Van.

Yeah, it’s as insufferable as it looks. An incensed Van finally snaps and threatens to quit; Mr. Hong overhears, but Van finally manages to stand up for himself and it pays off: Mr. Hong makes him manager of one of his local little stores, which seems to sell mostly cheap novelty junk. I’m not entirely sure why he does this, honestly, but it’s a mildly important character moment for Van, so okay, I guess?

Meanwhile, in the West household, things are getting a little crazy.

Cheryl and Kacey are promoting their new underwear business with a sorta quasi-striptease party, hosted by and for middle-aged women. It’s one of the aspects of the episode I like best, not because the women are sexy but more because they really aren’t; they’re a bunch of trashy fortysomething women, reminding the world that it isn’t just model-type people who like having sex, or who know how to have fun with it. Kacey makes this explicit with a little barb at the morbidly fascinated Pascalle, telling her they didn’t offer to use her as a model because they wanted to use “real women”, which is a nice reminder that toxic standards of femininity cut cruelly in both directions. So, yeah, good segment - made all the better by the horror of the younger girls who’ve been dragged along.

Van returns, utterly nonplussed at the scene before him, and they all retreat to the bedroom. Antony Starr’s comic acting here is great, actually - he follows the others to the room and finds them using his drugs with an indignant and confused response of “well... don’t!”, and it makes me laugh every time. Draska expresses some clear interest in him, which he once again ignores, as usual. The next scene is where the plot properly begins.

The gist of it is this: the Hongs’ local store has their goods transported from warehouse to shelf by Draska’s clan, the Doslics. Van discovers that there’s a discrepancy between the number of trading cards he was meant to be shipped and the number he actually received; he goes and politely asks the Doslics about it, and they do not take that well.

I come from good people - HONEST people! Made strong by our troubles!

Naturally, they think he’s accusing them of thievery. Naturally, this makes Van pretty sure they really are committing thievery, and a raging Mr. Hong agrees. The two proceed to keep escalating tensions, and the rest of the Wests get caught in the crossfire; mama Doslic gets into a fight with Cheryl in a supermarket car park, Pascalle finds her old tyre-modelling photos all defaced with violent graffiti, and it’s all mildly funny but also kinda dull. Eventually, it turns out that Van’s mate Munter has been stealing the cards from the warehouse all along, using the keys Van gave him for safekeeping. This is not the last time Van will find himself victimized by the consequences of his own actions.

I’m blasting through *a lot* of this plot here really quickly, and that’s cos it just isn’t very interesting for the most part. It’s trying to be a farce, mostly, and it sometimes succeeds; Van’s initial confrontation with the Doslics is really quite funny, and his steadily increasing panic as the situation just goes more and more wrong isn’t bad either. But it’s all a bit too by-the-numbers and predictable, and in the end none of the stakes feel real; we all know that in an episode like this, the Hongs and the Doslics were never really gonna properly come to blows, and they don’t. Van confesses a lot of stuff to Draska in a couple of secret meetings, and while he’s initially paranoid about her loyalty, she proves herself by finding a way to fix the issue; she places all the blame for the break-ins on Eric (who was selling the stolen cards anyway, after buying them from Munter) and the two families come together to absolutely motherfucking whoop the guy’s ass, leaving him looking rather worse for wear.

...next thing I know I’m getting the shit kicked out of me by half the West Auckland United Nations!

If I have a favorite moment in this plot, it’s probably near the beginning, when the elder Doslic is first bringing in what he believes to be the full shipment of cards. He’s ranting and raving, the whole time he does it, about how much he just damn well hates the “chinks” and their terrible language skills, not to mention their driving - all while speaking in a heavy Croatian accent himself and also, oh yeah, taking their money. This show really does get quite a lot of comedy out of the idea that solidarity between marginalized groups really just doesn’t exist.

The rest of it, though? I mean, it does contain a couple of important moments, I guess. Van, after initially lying to protect Munter and only making everything worse, is genuinely willing to offer himself up, blame himself entirely, and essentially sacrifice himself in order to save everyone’s hides, and only doesn’t end up doing it because Draska fixes it all before he has to. That’s a nice reminder that Van, at his core, really is a genuinely good person, and that his internal conflict as a character all comes from the tension between that and the toxic masculinity he’s had indoctrinated deep within him by his father and the culture he’s grown up in. Cheryl demonstrates where her loyalties lie and takes Van’s side without a second’s hesitation after mama Doslic shows up with complaints; for all her problems with Van, she really does love him unconditionally. But there’s also too much stuff that doesn’t come off, like Van’s boring interactions with a mildly delinquent kid who likes the trading cards, or Tracy’s ever-one-dimensional mistreatment of Van.

Still, at least it’s better than Jethro’s plot.

Remember how Tracy knows now about Jethro’s little rape-by-deception thing a few episodes ago? Well, she still doesn’t seem to be thinking of it as rape, but she is trying to get him to apologize for it nonetheless. Jethro, meanwhile, wants to root her again, and he knows he can’t do that without apologizing. So Jethro’s plot this episode is several scenes in a row of him miserably failing to pull off a convincing apology, and... that’s it, really. Hugh’s back, being annoying as usual (though it’s intentional enough that it doesn’t bother me too much), and Loretta briefly shows up to mock him for how bad he is at apologizing (talk about the pot calling the kettle black!), but for the most part this is all really redundant and dull. The only interesting part comes in Loretta’s video shack, where Jethro straight up lies to Caroline’s face, right in front of Loretta, in order to make himself some free time to go and keep trying it with Tracy. Loretta, of course, is too sociopathic to feel sorry for her, and we all knew a couple of episodes ago that Jethro wasn’t gonna be able to maintain it with her as a regular relationship, but the beginnings of heartbreak on Caroline’s face as she begins to get an inkling, in her subconscious, of what’s going on is genuinely sad.

But the ending of this plot? It’s awful, and in a really unfortunate way. In the end, see, it turns out Tracy never really wanted an apology; she likes Jethro, doesn’t really care about the fact that he deceived her in such an intimate way, and wants it with him again. She decides he’s ready when... he just refuses to apologize one time, admitting he isn’t sorry because (and this is possibly the worst line of dialogue in the whole show, so brace yourselves): “why would I be, when it was the best fuck I’ve ever had?”

Eugh.

So they start having an affair, and that’ll stay important. Meanwhile, Van’s plot ends similarly, in the superficial respect: Draska finally convinces him to have sex with her, as a celebration for the two of them getting out of that little escapade with everything intact, and it’s also the start of a relationship. Her toxicity, of course, has been evident the whole time from her unhealthy fixation on him, but if she demonstrated anything in this episode it was her intelligence and resourcefulness, so one suspects bad things on the horizon for Van. Nothing much happens with the rest of the characters - Loretta doesn’t do much other than the aforementioned mockery of Jethro and some mildly funny jabs at Pascalle’s choice of career, and Pascalle doesn’t do much other than get all horrified by what’s been done to her poster. On the whole, then, this is a disappointing episode, and maybe the worst one so far. Van will get good, I promise - the potential is all there already. But we’ve still gotta wait for now. Until next time.

#Antonia Prebble #Siobhan Marshall #antony starr #Robyn Malcolm #grant bowler #television #outrageous fortune #Frank Whitten #rachel lang #Gutter Black #nz

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scripttorture · 5 years

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Torture in Fiction: Carrie (1976)

I thought this one was an interesting request, I read Stephen King’s book Carrie as a young teenager but I’d never actually watched the movie. My first impression was that it was strangely sexual in a way that the book wasn’t.

But I’m not here to talk about the strange relationship the horror genre has with female sexuality. I’m rating the depiction and use of torture, not the movie itself. I’m trying to take into account realism (regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence of any apologist arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims and torturers.

Carrie is about a teenage girl who is severely bullied at school. She’s ostracised and tormented by her peers, ignored by staff and raised by an abusive extremist. In the midst of this she develops telekinetic powers.

The movie starts with a volley ball game that’s used to establish Carrie’s isolation and the casual way other students verbally abuse her. Later in the shower room Carrie starts to menstruate. She’s completely unaware of the process and panics thinking she’s dying.

As she pleads with the other girls to help her they start to laugh. They corner her in the shower pelting her with tampons and pads. The teacher who comes to intervene slaps and shakes Carrie as she huddles in the corner.

Carrie is sent home. Her mother responds to the news that Carrie’s period has started by hitting her with a book and trying to make her recite misogynist verses about Eve’s sin and the weakness of women. She then drags Carrie to a cupboard and locks her in.

The PE teacher punishes the group of girls who tormented Carrie earlier, their detention period is essentially a forced exercise regime designed to exhaust them. One of the girls, Chris, objects, she’s told the punishment for leaving is refusal of her prom tickets. She argues with the teacher and the teacher slaps and shakes her. Chris leaves.

One of the girls, Sue, appears to regret what she did and persuades her boyfriend Tommy to ask Carrie to the prom in Sue’s place.

Carrie initially refuses, suspecting that it’s a ruse to humiliate her again. Tommy tracks her down to her home and repeatedly asks her to come, not taking Carrie’s repeated refusals for an answer. With her mother calling in the background Carrie eventually gives her very unenthusiastic consent. The scene strongly suggests she does this to get rid of Tommy.

In the mean time Chris blames Carrie for her problems and enlists her boyfriend to take revenge. They break into a farm and kill a pig. The blood is put in a bucket over the stage in the prom hall and another of Chris’ friends volunteers to collect the ballots for prom king and queen.

Carrie argues with her mother about going to the prom. Her mother tries to order Carrie into the closet and Carrie refuses to go. Her mother shakes and berates her and Carrie uses her abilities to close the windows in the house. Her mother calls her a witch and tells her to renounce her powers. Carrie refuses.

Later Carrie’s mother tries to persuade Carrie not to go to the prom. She tells Carrie it’s sinful, tries to make Carrie ashamed of her body, says Tommy isn’t coming and then starts hitting herself and pulling out her own hair in a bid to ‘make’ Carrie stay. Carrie throws her mother on to the bed with her powers.

Carrie and Tommy go to the prom and Carrie appears to be enjoying herself. Chris’ friends rig the voting so that Tommy and Carrie are announced as the prom king and queen. Carrie appears overjoyed.

Sue happily watches them take the stage from the sidelines. Then she notices the rope and the bucket of blood above Carrie. Sue follows the rope under the stage where Chris and her boyfriend are hiding but a teacher tugs her away.

Chris pulls the rope and Carrie is drenched in blood in front of the school. Tommy is hit on the head with the bucket and falls to the floor.

Carrie uses her powers to barricade the doors and turns the fire hose on the trapped crowd. She shorts out the electrics and begins bringing objects down on the crowd, killing the PE teacher. Wires from the microphone wrap around the Principal and he’s thrown against the stage backdrop. The stage catches fire and Carrie walks calmly down from it while the other students panic and scream around her.

As she walks out down the road Chris and her boyfriend drive up behind her and try to hit her with the car. Carrie makes the car swerve, it crashes and explodes.

Carrie returns home and finds lit candles all over the house. When she finds her mother she asks for comfort and her mother asks her to pray. Then she stabs Carrie.

Carrie falls down the stairs and tries to crawl away, but her mother follows with the knife, smiling. The doors are locked and as her mother advances Carrie uses her powers to stab her mother repeatedly. This seems to be instinctual because she later takes her mother’s body in her arms.

The roof starts to collapse and Carrie drags herself and her mother’s body into the cupboard she was locked in to pray. The house collapses around them and catches fire.

In this case most of what I’m reviewing isn’t legally torture, because the legal definition in most countries requires the abuser to be in an official position of power. Carrie is mostly tormented by her peers, people who don’t hold any legal power over her.

There’s a lot going on here and I found it quite hard to categorise the movie. In the end I decided to give it 5/10

The Good

The movie doesn't show abuse as a successful method of control. Slapping Carrie doesn't calm her down. Verbal and physical abuse from her classmates doesn't change her behaviour. Her mother's abuse doesn't stop her wanting, or seeking, 'normal' high school things. Abuse directed towards Chris doesn't change her objectives or make her submit to what she sees as an unfair punishment.

Carrie does show appeasement behaviour towards her mother at several points, but the movie puts this in a larger emotional context. Carrie might thank her mother and kiss her after being abused but the following scene shows her crying in her room. In fact I think what this film shows is how victims often feel constrained by circumstances beyond their control. As soon as the balance of power shifts Carrie starts to defy her mother.

One of the things that stood out for me throughout this movie was the way it portrayed abuse and isolation as intertwined. Carrie is abused at home and hence she is 'weird' and hence she is isolated at school and hence she's an easy target for bullying and more abuse. That's unfortunately very true to life. And it applies to adult survivors just as much as children.

The movie also shows a systematic failure in the school when it comes to tackling abuse. The PE teacher’s response is reactive; she doesn’t actually protect Carrie from her peers and her failure to get through to Chris arguably prompts the ‘prank’ that drives Carrie to violence. This also seems very true to life.

Emotional abuse isn’t dismissed at any point. Most of the physical abuse throughout the movie isn’t scarring; it’s isolation and slaps and small rooms which is often presented as if it does no lasting harm. This isn’t the case here.

The responses different characters have to abuse throughout all seem possible. Carrie’s attempts to defy her mother, withdrawal and appeasement behaviour are all plausible behaviours in abused children. Anger, aggression and violent outbursts are possible and Chris demonstrates them as well as Carrie.

Symptoms also seem apparent even though they’re never named. The ending shows Sue suffering from night terrors and possibly PTSD. Carrie’s behaviour before the prom can be interpreted as showing anxiety and depression.

The Bad

Throughout the movie I didn’t feel as though there was any moral judgement placed on any of the characters. Their actions were presented and the way other characters responded to those actions was presented. For the majority of the abusive incidents I don’t think this is a bad thing. I don’t usually think it’s necessary to spoon feed readers moral messages. But I found the casual use of violence by a teacher who is framed as sympathetic troubling. I also found the way violence between Chris and her boyfriend was framed as normal troubling.

In a similar vein I found the attitude to consent worrying. Carrie is essentially harassed into agreeing to go to the prom. Tommy is pressured by Sue into asking Carrie. Chris pressures her boyfriend into bullying Carrie. Carrie’s mother states that she was raped and then that she enjoyed it.

While the movie clearly shows the reasons Carrie turns on her teachers and school-mates it’s still centred on a young, vulnerable abuse survivor being a danger to the people around her. Which is an unfortunately common narrative.

The idea that abuse survivors are dangerous is propped up by Carrie’s mother claiming she was raped moments before trying to murder her daughter.

Miscellaneous

I was surprised by the level of casual violence and abuse in the movie. Within the first half hour there are several depictions of teachers hitting students (which can be classed as torture), parental abuse, partner abuse and abuse by peers. I suspect much of this reflects different attitudes to violence at the time the film was made.

Overall

I think there are probably a lot of cultural references and touchstones I’m missing throughout this. Even without the bullying and violence it isn’t a school experience I recognise. I can’t help but wonder how different the effect is on an audience that had a mix of genders at school and had things like ‘the prom’ shape their adolescence. In fact just the casual portrayal of teenagers having cars seems unusual to me.

I didn’t really feel moved by the story and I didn’t feel like I recognised or sympathised with any of the characters. It’s certainly not how I would write a story about abuse.

But that doesn’t make it a bad portrayal. My interpretation is that it’s primarily a story which shows characters making a string of bad decisions rather than one which endorses those decisions. The narrative itself seems to present very little judgement, it shows the characters judging each other but doesn’t really seem to support any one.

That lack of internal judgement means it’s possible to interpret Carrie as a narrative about a survivor who feels she has no choice but violence because she faces systematic abuse and a systematic lack of practical support. It’s also possible to interpret Carrie as a narrative about how survivors are a danger to the community at large.

Everything that Carrie shows in terms of responses to abuse and its effects seems plausible to me. None of the abusive practices are portrayed as harmless. Nothing that would cause death or serious injury is portrayed as harmless.

Having said that, Carrie herself is still the villain.

I think we should have room for stories about survivors ‘taking revenge’ and survivors who are just bad people. There are violent and abusive survivors in real life but it’s not nearly as common as most people think.

I’m not sure this story is nuanced enough to successfully make the distinction between showing a violent survivor and showing survivors as violent.

There’s still some good stuff here. The story never dismisses or belittles abuse. It’s focused on the effects and fallout of abuse in a way that seems quite unusual for a horror story. I particularly liked the way the movie showed the communal failure to support or protect Carrie because that is so true to life. It also does a fantastic job of highlighting how interconnected abuse and isolation can be as well as the ways that can make survivors vulnerable.

If this was written today I’d say it was a good first draft. As it is I think this is a little dated and some of the narrative choices leave very unfortunate implications. But there’s a lot of good in here too.

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#tw torture #tw rape #tw familial abuse #torture in fiction #Carrie #fantasy #torture in schools #emotional abuse #clean torture #writing victims

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aridara · 6 years

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Verifying a list of “hateful feminist quotes”. (From F to M)

Continuing my checking of whether these quotes are actually hateful opinions of feminists (instead of, say, non-hateful opinions, or opinions we can’t know where they came from, or fictional opinions made by fictional characters...) or not.

"I was, in reality, bred by my parents as my father's concubine... What we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend on the sexual slavery of our children. What's more, this is a cynical arrangement our institutions have colluded to conceal.".

Sylvia Fraser Journalist

Unverifiable. Once again, the only places where this quote is cited is from this same copy-pasted “hateful feminist quotes” list, which I’ve shown (and will keep showing) over and over to be fucking dishonest, to say the least. By this point, NOBODY would give it the benefit of the doubt.

"All men are rapists and that's all they are"

Marilyn French, Authoress; later, advisoress to Al Gore's Presidential Campaign.

Fictional - it comes from "The Women’s Room" (1977). Specifically, Val (one of the fictional characters in the book) says it right after her daughter has been raped.

"All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey."

Marilyn French, The Women's Room, Summit Books, 1977

True, but not hateful (and not from "The Women's Room"). It's definitely a denunciation of the rigid gender roles that put the man as the family’s head, and the woman as the servant who has to serve the man - even sexually. Notice how she talks about “patriarchists”? Yeah, those are the people who want to enforce those gender roles.

"The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations...obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign."

Marilyn French, The Women's Room, Summit Books, 1977

True, but not hateful (and not from "The Women's Room"). She was talking about rape culture, or one aspect of it - specifically: the refusal to see violence against women as a systemic issue. It’s easier to blame social problems on single deranged individuals (which are “not me”) rather than admit that they’re social problems (and thus “also me”); but it doesn’t solve those problems. This is what French was denouncing.

"My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter."

Marilyn French, Author "The Women's Room"

Again: fictional. "The Women's Room" is a fictional book.

“As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women…he can sexually molest his daughters… THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE.”

- Marilyn French

True, but not hateful; it has been massively (I suspect deliberately) edited. Here's the full quote, with the parts that anti-feminists chopped away in bold:

"As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. Beyond that, it is not necessary to beat up a woman to bear her down. A man can simply refuse to hire women in well-paid jobs, extract as much or more work from women than men but pay them less, or treat women disrespectfully at work or at home. He can fail to support a child he has engendered, demand the woman he lives with wait on him like a servant. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women, whether mate, acquaintance, or stranger; he can rape or sexually molest his daughters, nieces, stepchildren, or the children of a woman he claims to love. THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE."

So, yeah. Anti-feminists forgot to include job discrimination, general disrespect, and treating your wife like a servant to the list; with their omission, they try to make French appear as if she was saying "most men are rapists, murderers, or beaters of women". Pretty fucking dishonest, to say the least.

"My own informal survey of adult women suggests that very few reach the age of twenty-one without suffering some form of male predation--incest, molestation, rape or attempted rape, beatings, and sometimes torture or imprisonment."

Marilyn French, The War Against Women, Ballantine Books, 1992, p. 195)

Unverifiable and not hateful. Given the massive bullshit that happened with the previous quote, I now suspect that anti-feminists attempted the same trick here - cutting away stuff like job discrimination/general disrespect/being treated like a servant.

"The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race."

Sally Miller Gearhart, in The Future - If There Is One - Is Female.

Huh, look at that: a true and actually hateful quote. Good job. Have a cookie.

"[Men are] freaks of nature... full of queer obsessions about fetishistic activities and fantasy goals."

Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman, Knopf, 1999

Unverifiable. While various sources report the quote to try and attack Greer, I cannot find any part of the quote in the "The Whole Woman" ebook. Maybe there is, and I just cannot see it because it's just a preview, but I'm very doubtful.

"If women are to effect a significant amelioration in their condition it seems obvious that they must refuse to marry."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, McGraw-Hill, 1971, p. 317)

Unverifiable - same as the above - and probably not hateful, given that this is, once again, about forcing women into heteronormative gender roles and marriages. Maybe the quote really exists in the "The Female Eunuch" ebook; but I can't find it.

"...men bash women because they enjoy it; they torture women as they might torture an animal or pull the wings off flies."

Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman, Knopf, 1999

Unverifiable - see the previous. However, there are a few quotes where Greer points out that some men torture women, and very probably enjoyed doing so.

"The man regards (woman) as a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon."

Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, McGraw-Hill, 1971)

Once again: unverifiable. But it looks like Greer here is talking about the attitude of many men at the time.

"Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release."

Germaine Greer

True, but not hateful. Here's the original quote from 1970 (again, the bolded part is the one that anti-feminists cut out):

"Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves."

This isn’t about whether men should be all thrown in prison or not. This is about how putting “security” above everything else means stripping any choice from your life - which would make it so that it couldn’t even be called “life” at all.

In an interview Germaine Greer (radical feminist, writer) was asked the question, "You were once quoted as saying your idea of the ideal man is a woman with a dick. Are you still that way inclined?" Greer first denied that she had said it, and then replied, "I have a great deal of difficulty with the idea of the ideal man. As far as I'm concerned, men are the product of a damaged gene. They pretend to be normal but what they're doing sitting there with benign smiles on their faces is they're manufacturing sperm. They do it all the time. They never stop. I mean, we women are more reasonable. We pop one follicle every 28 days, whereas they are producing 400 million sperm for each ejaculation, most of which don't take place anywhere near an ovum. I don't know that the ecosphere can tolerate it."

Germaine Greer At a Hilton Hotel literary lunch, promoting her book, The Change-Women, Aging and the Menopause, Knopf, 1992 from a news report dated 11/14/91)

Unverifiable. It should say “SUPPOSEDLY from a newsreport THAT NOBODY SEEMS TO BE ABLE TO FIND”. So, yet another unsourced quote.

Oh, and the “My ideal man is a woman with a dick” quote? ALSO unsourced.

"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together…. Whatever its ultimate meaning, the breakup of families now is an objectively revolutionary process…. No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children…."

Linda Gordon in "Functions of the Family," WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969

True - this quote is actually a really existing quote. It’s also distinctly non-hateful of men. It’s distinctly angry at the social imposition of marriage and the nuclear family system, though - but remember: the wife was supposed to stay at home and obey her husband in everything, back in 1969.

"And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference."

Susan Griffin

True, but not hateful. I’ve managed to track the quote. And guess what? It was a talk about how the social expectations of the time (this part was written in 1971) expected the woman to turn down sexual advances even if she desired them, because it was considered “unchaste” for a woman to desire sex; and expected the man to wear down the woman’s “reserves”, without checking whether the woman in question actually wanted the sex, or not. It the same part, Griffin explains how, *with this social system* (that she did NOT create, nor is she advocating for) the difference between “a man who wear down a woman’s reservations” and “a rapist” is simply in how much pressure they use to make the woman have sex with them.

“We live in a culture that condones and celebrates rape. Within a phallocentric, patriarchal state the rape of women by men is a ritual that daily perpetuates and maintains sexist oppression and exploitation. We cannot hope to transform “rape culture” without committing ourselves fully to resisting and eradicating patriarchy.”

–Bell Hooks, “Seduced by Violence No More,” in Stan, Adele ed. Debating Sexual Correctness (New York, 1995)

True, but not hateful. The book is specifically talking about rape culture - aka a culture that, even if it claims that rape is wrong, in practice it fails to adequately deal with rape, instead blaming women for getting raped. This, in turn, allows sexist men to oppress women with next to no consequences.

"When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression..."

Sheila Jeffreys

Unverifiable. HOORAAY!

“In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them”

(Dr. Mary Jo Bane, feminist and assistant professor of education at Wellesley College, and associate director of the school’s Center for Research on Woman).

Unverifiable, and probably not hateful. For starters, the source for this quote is Lew Rockwell, which is an INCREDIBLY far-right-biased source.

For another, the quote sounds like part of an argument in favor of the communal parenting, which is an argument that has been pretty explored. Also, note how she refers to communal parenting - not to women-only parenting.

"I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have. He does not have it not because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it."

Former US Congresswoman Barbara Jordan

Huh, look at that. This quote (it’s reported in a 1992 issue of Texas Monthly, but the actual quote doesn’t have a date) is actually true, and does sound hateful. Can someone check out the score? Because, at the time of this writing, I checked 42 quotes, only 2 (possibly 3) of which were verified to be true and actually hateful.

"Marriage has existed for the benefit of men and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women.... Male society has sold us the idea of marriage.... Now we know it is the institution that has failed us and we must work to destroy it.... The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore, it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men."

Nancy Lehmann, Helen Sullinger, Declaration of Feminism, 1971

Unverifiable. Apparently there is a book titled "The document: a declaration of feminism" published in 1971; but there's no way to verify if that quote actually exists. And the link I provided is basically the only source of that book's existance - outside of the edited quote above, which is present only in anti-feminist websites.

There is also the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen", written by Olympe de Gouges in 1791. Coincidence? I have no idea. Maybe it is.

"Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence."

Judith Levine

Maybe true, but there is no context. I can’t make heads or tails of what it actually means. It’s the same case as some of the Dworkin quotes - no indication of the work or the context it was taken from.

"I feel what they feel: man-hating, that volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear, and rage at men. It is hatred not only for the anonymous man who makes sucking noises on the street, not only for the rapist or the judge who acquits him, but for what the Greeks called philo-aphilos, 'hate in love,' for the men women share their lives with--husbands, lovers, friends, fathers, brothers, sons, coworkers."

Judith Levine, My Enemy, My love

Unverifiable. The only sources talking about this quote are anti-feminist ones.

"There are no boundaries between affectionate sex and slavery in (the male) world. Distinctions between pleasure and danger are academic; the dirty-laundrylist of 'sex acts'...includes rape, foot binding, fellatio, intercourse, auto eroticism, incest, anal intercourse, use and production of pornography, cunnilingus, sexual harassment, and murder."

Judith Levine; summarizing comment on the WAS document, (A southern Women's Writing Collective: Women Against Sex.)

The quote itself is unverifiable and not hateful, given that all of those acts have been (1) used by men against women, and (2) justified as “normal” sexuality by those same men.

However, the bit where the anti-feminist author of this list talks about “Women Against Sex” is false: the real title of the document Levine was talking about was "Sex resistance in heterosexual arrangements: Manifesto of the Southern Women’s Writing Collective". Because making up a false title to demonize feminists is acceptable behavior, am I right, anti-feminists? (# sarcasm)

"Men's sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can 'reach WITHIN women to fuck/construct us from the inside out.' Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women's own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, 'even if she does not feel forced."

Judith Levine

Slightly unverifiable - I can’t find neither a scan, nor the citation for the full Levine quote. What I did find was the book Levine was looking at - My Enemy, My Love (1993), a book that talks about “gender roles, the social definitions of masculinity and femininity, the culture’s assignment of certain exclusive traits to each biological sex, [which] have imprisoned us on either side of a divide”. Also: no mention about whether the women interviewed by Levine were feminists or not, and in particular, no mention of the context for the quote.

"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman."

Catherine MacKinnon

False. The quote apparently comes from Playboy, Oct 1986; but it wasn’t written by MacKinnon, nor anyone was able to track the instance where she supposedly originally said/wrote that.

"You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs."

Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses of Life and Law – Sex and Violence: A Perspective, Harvard University Press, 1987

True, but out of context. From what I can understand, this is from yet another discussion about non-con pornography (“Only Words”, 1993); MacKinon wasn't talking about families in general.

What's with anti-feminists taking discussions about problematic and sexist porn and deciding that feminists were talking about everyday life? What, do anti-feminist believe that pornography is an accurate representation of real li-

Nevermind, let's move on...

"Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism."

Catherine MacKinnon" Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p.10

False. The quote is completely absent from MacKinnon's book, or any of her books. Apparently, this is a slightly modified quote from "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism".

"In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent."

Catherine MacKinnon

Misattributed. The quote itself comes from "Professing Feminism", which wasn't written by MacKinnon, but by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge; they were talking about MacKinnon and Dworkin's opinions - they weren't quoting them. (And no, neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon believed that intercourse is rape.). The misattribution was caused by right-wing columnist Cal Thomas, who wrote an article about "Professing Feminism" and mistakenly attributed that quote to MacKinnon.

“The care of children ..is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation…[This] would further undermine family structure while contributing to the freedom of women.”

–Kate Millet, Sexual Politics 178-179

Misattributed. Here, Millet isn't talking about his own beliefs; he's talking about Engels's. Specifically, he's talking about how the idea that "The woman is naturally the one best equipped to raise a child" has the effects of:

Put a limitation on the woman, but not the man. If the woman wants to, say, pursue a career, she's forced to deal with child-raising AND with pursuing the career; the man has to deal only with the latter, because society pressures the woman into doing the former.

It's inefficient, because you just decide that the woman is the one most capable of raising a kid, instead of looking at which person is the most capable.

"We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage."

Robin Morgan.-From Sisterhood Is Powerful, (ed), 1970, p. 537

True, but not hateful. Again: “marriage” presupposed that the woman stayed at home and obeyed her husband in everything. I fail to see how being against the imposition of this kind of marriage/gender roles is hateful.

"I feel that 'man-hating' is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."

Robin Morgan.-former president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and editor of MS magazine

True (1973). I also fail to see what’s wrong with “class-hatred”, aka being justifiably angry with the oppressing class while fighting against its privileges. I mean, I do understand that nobody shouldn’t oppress anyone else even if they were oppressed beforehand, but here we’re talking about expressing justified anger against an oppressive system, and wanting to dismantle it. What, is that illegal now?

"I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire."

Robin Morgan.

True, but not hateful. I fail to see where’s the problem with this quote. It’s basically the concept of “yes means yes” - you don’t have sex with anyone unless they want it. ...Oh, wait, now I see why anti-feminists have a problem with this quote.

"And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism--the lie that there can be such a thing as 'men's liberation groups.' Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group, specifically because of a 'threatening' characteristic shared by the latter group--skin, color, sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters, but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism--the oppressed have no alternative--for they have no power but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men--but in the short run it's going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women--kill your fathers, not your mothers".

Robin Morgan.

True (1970), but not hateful. This shows a big miscommunication problem between MRAs and feminists. See, many feminists define sexism not as “acts of individual discrimination against a gender”, but as “an oppressive social system where one gender is treated as inferior”. By that logic, what MRAs claim is “sexism against men”, feminists call it "discrimination against men", but not "sexism against men", because women did NOT create this system where masculinity is put on a (very narrow) pedestal and femininity is derided. As Morgan put it:

"The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters, but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism—the oppressed have no alternative—for they have no power but to fight. In the long run, Women’s Liberation will of course free men—but in the short run it’s going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily."

You can’t compare the situation of an oppressed class (who has to tear down the system biased against it) with that of the privileged class (who actually made the biased system in the first place and could fix it). And what Morgan is saying is correct. Systematic oppression divide society in a privileged group (which has a certain amounts of benefits that the oppressed do not have, and/or is exempt from various disadvantages that instead the oppressed do face) and an oppressed one. Dismantling such a system DOES damage the privileged group, because it takes away their privileges - privileges that they shouldn't have in the first place, and that are based on the oppression of marginalized groups.

“My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.”

-Robin Morgan

Not hateful. From the looks of it, here Morgan is talking about the effects of white colonialism and racism - specifically how they benefit white or white-passing people such as her. For example: being allowed to travel or emigrate wherever you want and be treated as a person, while non-white immigrants are by default believed to be violent criminals, murderers, and rapists.

#debunking antifeminism

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cutsliceddiced · 5 years

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New top story from Time: The Handmaid’s Tale Was a Warning. Three Decades Later, Margaret Atwood Is Back With Another

Margaret Atwood wants to know more about The Bachelorette. We’re chatting in her publisher’s office in Toronto when I mention the dating show where 30-some men vie for the affection of a single woman, all on camera. She has questions: “Why are they even participating in this?” “What if they’re rejected?” “I’m wondering if she’s just pretending to go along with it?”

There is an irony here, observing Atwood equate the show to Sartre’s adage “Hell is other people” come to life. She is, after all, known for a book that describes one of the most brutal mating rituals in the canon. In her landmark 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, a totalitarian theocracy has taken over the U.S. in the midst of a fertility crisis. Offred, one of few women who can still bear children, is forced to participate in reproductive-slavery ceremonies in the Republic of Gilead. Offred’s story ends with a notoriously ambiguous cliff-hanger: she steps into a van that will take her either to fresh hell or to freedom. For 34 years, Atwood, now 79, has deflected readers’ questions about her protagonist’s fate. But on Sept. 10, she will publish The Testaments, a new book that promises to resolve that mystery and many more.

The Testaments arrives at the peak of Atwood’s prominence. In 2017, her 32-year-old novel soared back to the best-seller list when it became one of a handful of classic dystopias that seemed to portend troubling themes of the current era and evoke prescient anxieties about women’s rights. Three months after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Hulu premiered an adaptation with Atwood’s involvement that has won 11 Emmys. Women’s-rights demonstrators around the globe — at pro-choice rallies in South America and Europe, at Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in the U.S. — have donned the handmaid uniform of crimson cloaks and white bonnets to make their case. Atwood’s voice has become a rallying cry against climate change and threats to equality — last year she headlined a summit on the intersection of those issues, named after a reference to The Handmaid’s Tale. Protest signs at the 2017 Women’s March bore the slogan “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again,” her name now synonymous with resistance.

Atwood long rejected calls for a sequel because, she says, she knew she couldn’t re-create Offred’s voice. But as she saw the world change, she realized Offred wasn’t the only way back into the story. She began drafting The Testaments partway through 2016.

The anticipation has few precedents. The U.S. publisher announced a 500,000-copy first-print run, and the novel made the Man Booker Prize short list despite a strict embargo. Atwood will launch it with a live interview onstage in London, which will stream to 1,300 cinemas around the world. It’s a larger-than-life reception for a larger-than-life figure, one still a tad bewildered by the fanfare. She makes a point of stating the obvious: “It’s just a book.”

***

Growing up in Canada, Atwood wrote whenever she could — in the high school yearbook, in a college magazine under the pseudonym Shakesbeat Latweed. Her early jobs included a teen venture in puppeteering and later market research, and she published her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969. Since then she has published more than 60 works of fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, poetry and children’s literature. The Handmaid’s Tale was a breakthrough, landing her on the Booker short list for the first time. In 2000, she became the first Canadian woman to win the award, for The Blind Assassin.

Photograph by Mickalene Thomas for TIME

On the patio of her neighborhood café, Atwood glances over her shoulder to scan for eavesdroppers. “Things never used to be like this,” she says, peeking out from under a sun hat. Caution is justified: the plot of The Testaments is the closest-guarded secret in publishing since Harry Potter lived (again). Impostors posing as book agents tried to steal the digital manuscript, so publishers around the world agreed to go analog. Rare copies were distributed under fake names, like The Casements by Victoria Locket.

Atwood famously wrote part of The Handmaid’s Tale in Cold War–era Berlin, influenced by the fog of distrust that shrouded the East. That same atmosphere propels the sequel, which is narrated by three women. One was raised in Gilead, too young at its rise to remember a life before it; another is a Canadian teen with a past she has yet to understand; the third is Aunt Lydia, a villain in the regime and the only one of the three to have appeared in the foreground of The Handmaid’s Tale. In swift prose — lightened by winking references to American history, like a café named for anti–Equal Rights Amendment activist Phyllis Schlafly — Atwood weaves together three distinct narratives to chronicle the rise and fall of Gilead.

Over the course of several interviews, Atwood doles out measured tidbits about her experience writing the book. She admits to feeling some nerves about the highly anticipated project but closes the topic with a pat “What is life without challenges?” She often veers toward history and deadpans jokes; she’s not a “Dear Diary–type of person,” she says. When asked how she feels about the excitement surrounding The Testaments, she offers a few words but soon dives into a lesson on Icelandic manuscripts. Before describing her path to writing in terms of the politics of the 1940s and ’50s, she pauses to ask when I was born. “That’s hilarious,” she says. “You remember nothing.”

Atwood’s talent for capturing history’s tendency to repeat itself has led some to call her a prophet. (She insists she’s not — just ask her old colleagues at the market-research firm where she declared Pop-Tarts would never take off.) Certain scenes from The Testaments — children ripped from the arms of their parents, flights across borders, inhumane detention centers — track closely with today’s headlines. But Atwood can point to multiple historical examples for each. She has a rule that each of the dark circumstances, rules and customs in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments and the TV show, which range from genocide to ritual rape, must have a historical precedent. “I didn’t want people saying, like some have said, ‘How did you make up all this twisted stuff?'”

She sees her role as the person who drops a flare on the highway — she wrote the new book in part because she worries the world is trending more toward Gilead than away from it. A child of the ’30s, Atwood sees authoritarianism tightening its grip in Europe, but also in leading U.S. Republicans’ response to election interference: “It just does not compute,” she says. “Unless of course what they really want is an authoritarian regime. If that’s what they really want, spit it out: ‘We hate democracy.'”

Yet even in Atwood’s darkest writing, optimism prevails. Both Gilead novels end with scenes that indicate common sense has triumphed. Their narrators record their stories for the benefit of history, a perspective that leaves room to hope for a better world. “If you are reading,” Atwood writes in Lydia’s determined voice, “this manuscript at least will have survived.”

***

One autumn, as Atwood was sweeping leaves outside her Toronto mansion, the man next door told her people refer to her as the “wicked witch” of the neighborhood. (The broom didn’t help.) Her mythology precedes her. Bruce Miller, the Handmaid’s showrunner, remembers every head turning as she entered a restaurant. When someone at the table asked her what it’s like to be a national treasure, she offered a perfectly Atwood response: “Exhausting.”

The author exists in a surreal intersection between her image and her life’s more stark realities, where caring for loved ones often takes precedence. Her partner, the novelist Graeme Gibson, is living with dementia. The morning after a doctor’s visit, Atwood runs through to-dos in the basement office in her home: there are appointments to schedule and bills to pay, a condo dispute to chase. (She stays in caretaking mode with me: “You were a naughty person, you didn’t eat any muffins,” she scolds, then sends me off with banana bread.)

Atwood has never been the type for superstitious writing rituals. She wrote The Testaments in hotels around the world, on trains and planes, wherever the phone couldn’t ring. Gibson wanted to re-create a voyage from his youth, traveling by ship to Australia. So Atwood did the first edit of The Testaments over the 21 days at sea while he slept.

She has a list of things she’d like to do but wonders if she’s too old: trek across Baffin Island, travel to Africa. She won’t say for sure whether she’ll write more Gilead novels (fans: it’s not a no) — in fact, she’s not much for discussing her future at all. Someday, she acknowledges, she’ll be “forcibly” retired. But she takes aging in stride. “There’s a lot of respect that comes with being the me that people recognize,” she says. “But if it’s the me that people don’t recognize, I’m just another old lady.”

In her office, Atwood strides past shelves of her archives — first editions, foreign translations, the original art from the best-known Handmaid’s Tale cover — pulling an item here and there to give away. Later she’ll meditate on the meaning behind our choices of what we keep and what we discard. What she’s really talking about is legacy, what we leave behind and how it may one day prove useful to our “Dear Readers,” whoever they may be. She asks me how many love letters from 1961 she should keep, and I suggest she hold on to the ones that speak to her, missing the point. “I don’t think it matters whether they speak to me or not,” she says. “Whether they speak is more interesting.”

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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poipoi1912 · 7 years

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SVU Thoughts

Just a quick (lol jk) overview of S18, now that it’s finally over, and some wishes for S19. I just had to put this post together, to properly leave S18 behind.

Character Progression in Season 18

Liv

She started off the season in a happy relationship, freshly back from a Paris vacation. She ended the season single af. Nothing else changed. Her professional life is exactly the same, and her personal life consists of Lucy practically living in her house.

Barba

He started off the season doing nothing. He ended the season also doing nothing. The only thing that changed was a suspension on his record, for something that happened decades ago, and the further deterioration of his career. The promising storyline of his death threats was dropped, and we still know absolutely nothing about his personal life.

Sonny

He started off the season as a recently licenced attorney who was doing job interviews for ADA positions. That was never mentioned again, same as his law degree and career aspirations. He ended the season as just another cop. He is the only character with a positive development in his personal life, as he was briefly revealed to be dating someone who's a 34B.

Amanda

She started off the season living with baby Jesse and Frannie, she got a (temporary?) houseguest in the form of her sister Kim, and now I guess she's Kim-less again (which is her loss). Absolutely nothing else happened in her life, personal or professional.

Fin

He started off the season wanting to become a Sergeant. He is the only character with a positive development in his professional life, as he passed the Sergeant's exam. He did not, however, end the season as a Sergeant. He's still a detective, badge and all, and he has not yet been "appointed" a Sergeant. The promising storyline of his son having a baby was dropped, so no Grandpa Fin for us.

To summarize: Liv is single, Sonny is not single, and Fin is almost a Sergeant. That's all.

Now let’s compare that to, say, Season 17.

Character Progression in Season 17

Liv

She started off that season alone, and she ended it in a happy relationship with Tucker. That relationship was tested, and it also put a delicious strain on her friendship with Barba, though both of those problems were thankfully resolved. She had to assert herself with Mike Dodds, who was the Chief's son-slash-plant, as well as a Sergeant who was hellbent on proving his worth, sometimes even undercutting her authority. She showed Mike who was boss, he fully accepted her as his superior, and then he died, leaving her to deal with his loss and the blame, which she thought fell on. Liv was tested as a leader, as a friend, as a romantic partner, and as a mother, and she came out wounded, but on top.

Barba

He started off the season doing nothing (lol), but he then tackled several politically charged cases and he stuck to his guns, every time. He fought for his beliefs, even when he disagreed with the squad. Barba had to deal with politicians and community leaders and union reps and and media attention. He was under pressure from his bosses (something acknowledged by other characters, like Liv and Sonny) and we got to see him as part of a relatively fully-formed political universe, which, in turn, allowed us to see what he was made of. We got to witness his stress, but also his backbone. Near the end of the season, we learned he had been receiving death threats, which again allowed him to show how fearless he is. When the season ended, we left him in protective custody, still in danger, but "not worried, not in here."

Sonny

He started off the season as a recent law school graduate, studying to pass the bar and considering his professional options. We got to see him shadowing Barba to advance his legal knowledge, we got to see him thanking Barba for the help, we got to see him celebrating his success (passing the bar exam) with the squad, excited hugs and all, and we also got to see Barba suggesting an ADA spot in Brooklyn, as a possible career option for him. Sonny had a very cordial relationship with Mike Dodds, who wasn't accepted very warmly by the rest of the squad. That showed Sonny's supportive and friendly side. When the season ended, we got to see Sonny's renewed desire to stay with SVU, after Mike's death, because career aspirations are one thing, but Sonny's work family is another. And Sonny wanted to be there for them. Still, the door was left open for Sonny to eventually pursue a different career path.

Amanda

She started off the season unexpectedly pregnant, and she made the decision to have the baby. She managed to overcome her struggles with addiction, for the sake of her child. She tried to reach out to her family for help (which, gurl!) and she was betrayed by them yet again. She found herself alone, or so she thought. In truth, Amanda found another family, in her team mates. Her relationship with Fin, which used to be more heavily featured, was strengthened and showcased after many years, and she also learned to rely on Sonny, as a good friend and an even better babysitter. Her relationship with Liv was also strengthened, and they were there for each other as mothers, as women supporting other women, even when they had professional disagreements. Amanda also had a very tense relationship with Mike Dodds, which enriched her character. It allowed her to keep her trademark sass/spunk while also showing her more human side, as she came to appreciate Mike, the more she got to know him.

Fin

He started off the season regretting the fact he wouldn't step up and take the Sergeant's exam. He resented Mike for that, even though it wasn't Mike's fault, and we got some interesting scenes between him and Liv, discussing just that. Discussing their lives, their careers (especially at their respective ages) and their future. Their responsibilities as the (de facto) leaders of the squad. Fin also got to be there for Amanda, as I mentioned above. At the end of the season, we also learned that his son was in the process of having a child, and Fin was an excited grandpa-to-be.

Mike

He didn't get the character development he deserved until later into the season, but he did function as a catalyst, allowing us to see different sides in all the other squad members. That's why a new character always brings something to the show. New dynamics are created. Again, the writing did not do Mike justice, and his death was rather senseless, but we did get to know him, in the end. He started off the season as a somewhat detached and aloof character, but he ended it as a member of the team. One we were all sad to lose.

So yeah. Draw your own conclusions :D

My conclusions?

Season 19 Suggestions

Bring in a new squad member.

That will breathe life into the show (like Sonny did, when he arrived) and it will flesh out the rest of the characters, as they try to navigate a new presence in the (practically empty) squad room.

Map out individual character arcs.

Take each character and say, “They will start the season HERE, and they will end it THERE.” It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate (especially for the characters who aren’t Liv). But it has to be something. Personal or professional. Some type of progress. Some forward movement. They can’t all end the season right where they started.

Rediscover the sense of a squad.

The characters are people. Colleagues. Friends. Family. They need to interact more heavily, in ways which showcase their dynamics. Similarities and differences alike. Since there are no actual “partners”, utilize that by mixing up the duos working each case. Don’t isolate characters. Integrate them.

Expand the types of cases being investigated.

Don’t just show “rich white people” crime, and exclusively focus on he said/she said rapes. Don’t show the same crime fifteen times. Variety is key.

Showcase Barba in the trial portion of the show.

Don’t waste time arguing physical evidence, when the legal arguments are much more interesting. Don’t spend twenty minutes on the defense attorney victim-blaming. Show Barba being cunning. Being smarter. Don’t allow him to be swayed by the non-lawyers (like Liv) or even the lawyers (like Sonny). Barba is the ADA, he makes the decisions. Show that. Give him back his strength and his big brass balls. Have him win, personally, and fail, personally.

Remember who the characters are.

And what they would do. Or what they wouldn’t do. Don’t sacrifice that for the sake of a twist, unless it’s a very good twist. Also, remember who the characters are to each other. Strengthen their bonds, show some friction, but let them be who they are. They’ve all existed for years, and they now transcend the week-to-week writing. Listen to the cast, and let the characters be true to themselves.

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fatgirlsguidetodating · 7 years

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Blog: Love behind bars; online dating for prisoners.

Maybe I’m old fashioned. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m old. Maybe I’m boring. But I truly don’t get the desire to pick a criminal’s profile to correspond with on a dating site. But it happens. Regularly enough for there to be a few sites catering to this need. One of my tweets even had a response from one of those sites offering free subscription or something. I didn’t take them up on the offer. Hell if I struggle to find a normal decent guy on the dating apps and sites I’m currently using why would I then look for love in prisons?

Take the example of Canadian killer Dustin Hales. He killed his wife while the lady both he and his wife had been having a relationship with watched. He was found guilty and given a life sentence with 17 years non parole. Now he’s on one of the dating sites for women on the outside to write to men inside called “Canadian Inmates Connect.” The majority of men on the site are openly looking for love or- at least- conjugal visits.

When asked why she set the site up founder Melissa Fazzina said she thought it could help promote rehabilitation by allowing the inmates the chance to forge and nurture positive connections in the outside world. Those working in the field cautiously agree.

“Almost anything that can create a sense of community and belonging upon release, or even while you’re in there, increases the possibility of a safe reintegration—because often these guys are coming out with nothing and nobody.”

Catherine Latimer, the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, a non-profit organization that works with offenders and promotes just and humane responses to crime, echoes this sentiment: “They’re in prison as punishment, not for punishment. They have a right to communicate with people. They have a right to have family and friends on the outside,” she says. (1)

It should also pointed out that even without the websites this sort of thing happens and has done for a long time. Consider Charles Manson, for example, who almost married his long time pen pal/fiancee. In England notorious inmate Charles Bronson, serving a life sentence, married a lady who wrote to him. Serial killer Richard Ramirez, the so-called Night Stalker, who murdered and dismembered 13 people in the 1980s, had no trouble finding a bride. Doreen Lioy started writing to Ramirez after falling for his picture in the paper. They were married in 1996 in the prison waiting room. Ted Bundy, a rapist-murderer who was suspected of murdering 35 young women, attracted gangs of admiring groupies who sat patiently through his court cases. Even John Wayne Gacy - not the most eligible man, with a history of drugging, raping and murdering 30 young men in Chicago - ended up marrying a woman he met while awaiting the death penalty. Even Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter in a purpose built cellar as his sex slave for 24 years, received hundreds of letters.

The cliche of the prison bride as trailed trash with peroxide dyed hair and a cigarette hanging out her mouth with a vocabulary that consists mainly of swear words is actually misguided. Research has shown these women all come from different backgrounds, different socioeconomic classes, different professions, different levels of education. Some were married, some weren’t. Some had kids, some didn’t. Carlos the Jackal become engaged to his lawyer last year. The famous Glasgow hard man Jimmy Boyle married a psychiatrist he met in prison. But it does make us ask why?

From the research I’ve done quite often serial killers or those who have committed a crime- or crimes plural- are often inundated with “fan mail”. And often the letters are super sexually explicit, contain naked photos, and proposals of marriage. From what I can gather all too often the women want to try and understand the man behind the monster, perhaps even to help them find redemption. What makes someone do this? Are they lonely and in search of emotional dependence from a captive audience? Or manipulative sociopaths living vicariously through ‘celebrity’ prisoners? Are they turned on by the fame that these ‘celebrity’ prisoners gain? Do they have their own issues- psychological or otherwise- that makes these men attractive to them? Englishman Alex Cavendish, former inmate and currently a social anthropologist, cites a few reasons.

Major factors to consider are dependency and control. “Dependence works both ways - financial for many prisoners, particularly those who don’t have family ties, as well as emotional.” He explains. In describing the type of women who write to prisoners he says, "I’ll be honest and say that a fair few of the female correspondents are lonely women who often have body-image concerns (many of those whose photos I’ve seen tend to be overweight.) They feel perhaps that a prisoner is likely to be less judgmental and more appreciative of any support - emotional and/or financial.” Of course it’s not all about love. Many women (and men) choose to reach out simply to provide friendship and compassion to those behind bars. Their actions provide a much welcome lifeline, a window to the outside world. (2)

A book called "Women who love men who kill” author Sheila Isenberg examines the idea of prison lovers and it seems that my feelings of why are common. Family and friends, even strangers, genuinely are bewildered at why women would put themselves in such a complex situation. (2)

She also explains that most often these women are damaged- they’ve been hurt in the past; they’ve been sexually abused, psychologically, emotionally abused. So a relationship with a man in prison leaves the woman in control. He’s locked away, he can’t hurt you, you decide when to visit him, you even decide whether or not to accept his collect phone calls. So they feel safer. (3)

Issenberg cites an example of a British woman who has been engaged to several death-row inmates in the USA, all of whom have since been executed. Yet she, and many of these women, claim they didn’t specifically chose the course for themselves. Karen Richey’s partner, for instance, is on death row in Ohio. Karen says that she wasn’t looking for a love affair when she made contact with Kenny, a 38-year-old Scot: “My war cry is that I only wanted to be a pen pal. Kenny insists this is going to be on my grave stone.” (4)

There is a condition known as hybristophilia (often referred to as “Bonnie and Clyde syndrome) which Wikipedia defines as "a paraphilia in which sexual arousal, facilitation and attainment of sexual orgasm are responsive to and contingent upon being with a partner known to have committed an outrage, cheating, lying, known infidelities or crime, such as rape, murder, or armed robbery. ” Don’t get me wrong- we all have had the bad boy phase at some point in our lives but I think this is taking it a bit too far.

The thing is though that the fantasy of these types of romances rarely matches the reality. For starters physical contact us obviously limited thus they often never progress past the courting stage. The men spend their days exercising or working in their prison jobs and in the evening writing letters to the women or trying to phone them. They are more compliant and attentive than they would be on the outside because the women send money, pay for their legal representation and afford them the tremendous parole advantage of a permanent address as well as the fact there are little female distractions whilst locked up.

Clinical Psychologist Dr Stuart Fischoff likens it thus; “The love object is almost irrelevant at this point. [The prisoner] is a dream lover, a phantom limb.” (2) Prison relationships therefore seem to retain the intoxicating elements of the “honeymoon period” of all relationships, where that first endorphin-flush of love always involves a degree of transference; whereby we all see our partners as we hope them to be, imagining that the love object embodies the qualities we crave. The excuses the women give for their partner’s alleged crimes operate as in all other relationships. They do what we all sometimes do when faced with negative information about loved ones: they refuse to believe it. They aren’t having to ask the men to pick up their dirty socks or put the toilet seat down.

When it comes to how these women dealt with the knowledge they were in love with someone who’d committed a terrible crime found ways to rationalise it or mitigate the crime and excuse it. For example: he didn’t really mean to be that murderer. In the course of interviewing women for her book Issenberg cited one woman who said, 'He was awkward and when the door hit him in the arm, the gun went off.’ And another one who said, 'His friends were all drinking and doing drugs and he got carried away and he didn’t mean to do it.’ (3)

So how do these dating sites for men behind bars work? Well they are like dating profiles on conventional dating sites. There’s a photograph, a short bio, hobbies and interests. The only difference in this part is the details of their incarceration. Again like conventional sites women pick the guy they like the look and sound of and start writing to them, building a rapport and hopefully a romantic relationship.

“Love a Prisoner” claims to have a “75% compatibility rating for those looking for their soul mate” – including inmates on death row. “Our mission is to give inmates a sense of hopefulness by connecting them to people on the ‘outside world’,” the website states. (5)

The forums on "Write a prisoner” give insight into what the women are looking for. They include things such as chatty prisoners, ones who don’t ask for money, and ones who haven’t committed sex crimes. The women have also slammed claims they are “groupies” of men who have committed vile acts. (5)

“Meet-an-Inmate” claims to be ranked #1 among prison pen pal websites and has been helping inmates connect with the outside world since 1988. They claim it’s a free, easy way to brighten up an inmates day but stress they are NOT a dating service. (6) However despite this romantic feelings can- and do- develop. There have been quite a few marriages from the site over the years. The founder, Arlen Bischke, explained that many prisoners get cut off from their family and friends so correspondence can really brighten their day. (7)

Christian Science Monitor reported that the online prisoner dating industry has grown from humble beginnings. Leading sites now boast “between 7,000 and 10,000 ads” and ABC News claim there are over a dozen major prisoner dating sites now. (7)

In conclusion I must admit to a certain fascination with true crime. I’ve got two shelves on my bookshelf dedicated to the genre after having discovered it during my undergrad legal degree and then my postgrad in criminology, as well as my time working in prosecution and the courts for the government. Shows about true crimes fascinate me. I devoured “making a murderer” (and read Jereme Butings book about that and the illusion of justice for indigent defendants which is pretty much the same in Australia these days given legal aid cuts mean cases are means tested and if they don’t think there’s a chance of winning they won’t take it purely because of lack of resources) and am loving “murder uncovered.” I’ve read a heap of books on Ivan Milat, Julian Knight, Bradley Murdoch and the infamous “underbelly” underworld crime spree. But would I then think to myself okay I’m going to write to these guilty criminals and maybe start some kind of friendship that could perhaps grow into a relationship? Hell no I don’t. (NB: I don’t believe that Steve Avery of MAM fame was guilty but that’s beside the point here.) I have no desire to want to correspond with killers, with men who will likely die in prison, let alone try and fall in love with them! Not only would it be an unequal and strange relationship but there would be no point. Plus the little fact that I don’t get turned on by men who could kill another human being with scant regard, or no regard, for the sanctity of life and the pain and suffering it would consequently create. And though I’ve really tried to understand the women who do this while researching and writing this blog post, and whilst I even partly understand some of the reasoning in bits, I just don’t get it. Love behind bars is just not for me.

Fatgirl.

Sources:

(1) https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/inside-the-matchmaking-service-for-murderers-rapists-and-violent-offenders

(2) https://www.google.com.au/amp/www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/dating-a-prisoner-what-attracts-people-on-the-outside-to-fall-in-love-with-convicted-criminals-10326587.html%3Famp

(3) https://www.google.com.au/amp/attn-google-amp.herokuapp.com/stories/6268/why-women-fall-in-love-prison-inmates

(4) https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/13/gender.uk

(5) https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/living/2907384/women-who-send-love-letters-to-prisoners-reveal-what-they-look-for-in-a-jailbird-pen-pal/amp/

(6) http://www.meet-an-inmate.com/

(7) http://thegrio.com/2011/12/20/online-sites-for-dating-men-in-prison-1/

Other sources:

https://www.google.com.au/amp/jezebel.com/5755106/women-who-marry-prisoners-arent-just-crazy-ladies/amp

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10665003/Murderous-love-Why-are-so-many-women-aroused-by-serial-killers.html

http://m.topix.com/forum/city/cape-girardeau-mo/TPEUTFH8HOOU5H9AF

Sites to meet prisoners (if you’re brave enough….)

http://www.conjugalharmony.com/

http://loveaprisoner.com/

https://www.prisondatingsite.com/

http://www.femaleprisonpals.com/

http://www.writeaprisoner.com/

http://www.prisonpenpals.net/

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